Earlier this year we introduced a sandbox feature within Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team Tasking Manager, providing a safe space to practice and experiment with the OpenStreetMap data model. This is built on the foundational work from OpenStreetMap US!

Beyond practice and data privacy, Sandbox setup is already proving to be a data annotation tool for machine learning workflows. Using sandbox, you can capture custom, non-standard schemas and training labels (like marine habitats or specialized features) without conflicting with live OSM data.

Looking ahead, we plan to extend this sandbox environment to handle data conflation, allowing users to bring in external datasets at the task level to compare, validate, and reconcile geometries and attributes against OSM.

A huge thanks to OpenStreetMap US, as well as Sam Woodcock, Kshitij Raj Sharma, Prabin Pathak, Sumit Dahal, Anil Raj Rimal, DK Benjamin, and everyone across the community who contributed to designing, testing, and reviewing this feature.

You can read the full overview on the HOT website here: https://www.hotosm.org/en/news/tasking-manager-sandbox-a-safe-space-to-train-test-and-experiment/

If you run workshops, train mappers, or work with experimental datasets, please test out the Sandbox on the Tasking Manager and let us know your thoughts or feedback!

Mohanta Public School provides CBSE English medium education in Rajarhat with a structured learning environment focused on academic and overall student development.

OSM Smart Menu, the browser extension created by jgpacker, had stopped working on current Chrome. I’ve taken over its maintenance, with his support (he transferred the Firefox listing and the translation project), and it’s available again for Chrome and Firefox.

It opens the place you’re looking at in other maps, at the same position and zoom, in one click.

• From Google Maps to OpenStreetMap, recent satellite imagery, street photos, or cycling, hiking and ski maps
• For mappers: opens nodes, ways, relations, changesets and users in iD, Rapid, JOSM, OSMCha, Osmose and other tools
• Also works on Wikipedia articles with coordinates
• Tools grouped by category, with search; you can add your own links and export your settings

Install

• Chrome and other Chromium-based browsers: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/pllgpbcnmadhafdifjpihbaiebofpeag
• Firefox (Android too): https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/osm-smart-menu/

Open source, no data collected. Ideas, bug reports and suggestions of sites to add: https://github.com/erickdeoliveiraleal/osm-smart-menu/issues. Translations are done on Weblate.

Because this question comes up again and again, I would like to document the answer here in a little more detail.

A garden house that was added two months ago to the OSM database is not displayed on a map at certain zoom levels, even though the underlying map data should actually be up to date. In my example, the problem was reported both in the GitHub repository of the map and in the GitHub repository of the German map style.

However, the map at karte.openstreetmap.de requests the tiles in exactly the same way as any other map that uses tiles from tile.openstreetmap.de: it retrieves them from the tile server tile.openstreetmap.de.

So, if you can rule out problems such as a local browser or map cache, troubleshooting continues at tile.openstreetmap.de.

New OpenStreetMap data should ideally become visible on tile.openstreetmap.de within a few minutes. After all, one of the most important tasks of the German tile servers is to show OpenStreetMap contributors as quickly as possible whether their changes have correctly arrived in the database.

This happens in two steps.

Keeping OSM data up to date

Database

The databases of the German tile servers are continuously updated via osm2pgsql using the latest OpenStreetMap data.

The current state of the database update can be seen directly below the map.

… See full entry

007 Group

007 Group Chakwal is a private, non-profit youth organization and friendship brotherhood group based in the Chakwal district of Punjab, Pakistan

Read More About : 007 Group

Bhubhar is a rural village located in the Chakwal District of Punjab, Pakistan

• District: Chakwal, Punjab, Pakistan • Postal Code: 48800 • Nearby Towns: Mulhal Mughlan, Dharuggi Rajgan, and Dhudial • Local Demographics: Home to communities of Jutt’s , Awans , Kahouts and Rajputs

Bhubhar Chakwal

This post reminds me: I really need to get on tagging which sidewalk sections are too narrow for wheelchairs, or would be wide enough except for the telephone poles stuck in them. Curb ramps at either end only tell part of the story.

Tagging wheelchair=no on a separately mapped sidewalk is obvious.

A while back, I tagged a particularly bad downhill section on a street where the sidewalk had been mapped as part of the road, and I hadn’t gotten on my “map ALL the sidewalks!” kick yet. IIRC I asked on one of the forums and we came up with sidewalk:both:wheelchair=no (and left/right equivalents). I’ve since remapped that one separately.

I’m not sure what I should do about tagging really steep sections. There’s one block I always used to avoid when taking the kid out in his stroller (when he was small enough for that) because I was terrified of losing my grip and chasing him down the hill into the cross-street at the bottom.

I could use incline tags, but they’re typically up, down, or a percentage. I guess I could try to calculate the angles? 🤷‍♂️ #

I learned about https://streetcomplete.app/ recently and decided to give it a try. I resolved a bunch of quests in the area around my favorite library and in Old Town Pasadena. Not sure I did it all correctly, but it was a fun and engaging way to get into contributing to OpenStreetMap.

I while ago, while I was looking at something else, I noticed that there was some fairly recent (June 2025) 360° street-level imagery in Mapillary along part of Chesham High Street, but most of the mapping there was from 10 or more years ago.

I came back to this yesterday, and set to work on improving the map. First I looked to improve the building outlines and used the Land Registry Index Polygons and Bing aerial imagery to align them properly. Then I used the Mapillary images to update the shops that were visible.

I also looked at the rest of the High street and tried to tidy things up as best I code, using FHODOT to add some shops/amenities and addresses, and adding missing address tags by interpolation. The Bing Streetside imagery of the street was very old (2017) but I used it in a few places to add missing shop names on objects that hadn’t been edited since before then.

I’ve also set up a page for Chesham in my Linear Maps tool, to make it easer to see the various POI objects and what details may be missing on them. There’s still a bit of arm-chair mapping to do here.

The whole High Street could really do with a full ground survey to check on the state of most of the shops. Maybe someone local will discover OpenStreetMap and be able to help here.

Detailed 3D buildings on OSM, without drawing a single part

Most buildings in OSM never get past a flat grey extrusion, and the reason is tedium rather than difficulty. Simple 3D Buildings is an easy scheme to read, but a decent tower needs dozens of building:part polygons, each with its own min_height and height. Nobody wants to draw 44 near-identical facade piers by hand.

So don’t draw them. Here is the whole recipe in one picture, from the Vesta Tower complex in Slemani: a 12-floor office tower, a 14-floor residential tower and the shopping podium between them.

The seven steps

… See full entry

A few days before SotM 2026 I was speaking to a friend and fellow attendee about the OSM community. I confidently told them the community is never very toxic, as at that time I’d never encountered wide-spread toxicity in OSM, nor had I ever felt that being a part of a marginalised group impacted the way people interacted with me or my contributions.

I’m sad to say that I no longer feel that way. I’ve written this post to increase awareness about this topic and to put this issue to rest, not to call out individuals.

Context

On the 14th of September I raised a question on the community forum. There had been an oppose vote which didn’t include a reason or feedback on my Lgbtq=* Revision proposal, which I found concerning. I posed that including a comment in an oppose vote was vital to the proposal process as it enables proposers to rewrite their proposals to account for the concerns of voters. I began writing a proposal to change the guidelines to require oppose votes to include a comment soon after.

During the RFC (feedback/discussion) phase of this proposal I actively sought out issues in my proposal; loopholes, poor phrasing, issues unaccounted for, etc. When people pointed them out I thanked them and edited the proposal accordingly, because my only goal was to write a strong proposal that strengthened the proposal process for everyone.

On Toxicity

… See full entry

Four months ago I started working on Atwood, Kansas. There are other people working on it to, so I was mostly just putting in addresses from the county assessor’s office. Today I put in the last two streets’ worth.

– Leia em português

     

IVIDES.org is celebrating its 20^th anniversary contributing to the expansion of knowledge about collective mapping

 

Presentation

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The Virtual Institute for Sustainable Development – IVIDES.org is celebrating its 20th anniversary with an important news: the Editora IVIDES has released two ebooks (in Portuguese) from the series Case Studies in Collaborative and Participatory Mapping—volume 2 (general) and volume 3 (a thematic dossier about disaster risk reduction, DRR)—which bring together contributions on collective mapping across various fields of knowledge.

The ebooks were organized and edited by Dr. Raquel Dezidério Souto, author of other books on this topic. The ebooks are available as open access on the publisher’s website, with the aim of broadening their reach and promoting greater awareness of the use of participatory methodologies.

… See full entry

Butler has to be the smallest place I’ve mapped. From the buildings and traces of sidewalks that are visible but now overgrown with trees and grass it’s clear this was once a more populated area. The Day County GIS shows that properties to the eastern side of the town were owned by a railroad. The properties in the center and western ends are mostly held in trusts — children and perhaps grandchildren of former residents.

According to the UnmappedSmallTownUSA bot that posts about towns needing mapping, the population is 13. Wikipedia lists the 2020 Census as 4.

How many planet trails are there in Switzerland? A planet trail (chemin des planètes, sentiero dei pianeti, Planetenweg, via da planets) is a walking route that represents the Solar System to scale, with stations marking each planet’s position. OpenStreetMap currently shows about two dozen.

List

Here is the current list:

• Aargau
• Arosa
• Bülach
• Burgdorf-Wynigen
• Disentis-Sedrun
• Effretikon-Kyburg
• Emmen
• Falera-Laax
• Frauenfeld
• Kreuzlingen Nord
• Kreuzlingen Süd
• Lägern
• Laufen BL
• Locarno
• Marly
• Monte Generoso
• Ringgenberg-Goldswil
• Ringgenberg-Oberried
• Schwanden/Sirius
• Solothurn Weissenstein
• St-Luc
• St. Gallen
• St. Stephan
• Visp
• Zürich Uetliberg

The same as overpass query

There is one along the Swiss border at Vaduz.

State of mapping

How detailed is our cartography?

• All stations mapped: Bülach, Effretikon-Kyburg, Falera-Laax, Frauenfeld, Kreuzlingen Süd, Lägern, Locarno, Marly, Monte Generoso (?), St. Gallen, St-Luc, St. Stephan, Vaduz, Visp, Weissenstein, Zürich Uetliberg
• Some or most stations mapped: Aargau, Burgdorf-Wynigen, Emmen, Kreuzlingen Nord, Laufen BL, Ringgenberg (both), Schwanden/Sirius
• Only a single node mapped: Arosa
• Entirely missing: ?

We have a couple of lonely Pluto nodes that haven’t made it into a trail yet: 1, 2.

For OSM tags on these features, see the wiki pages about:

• Tag:educational=planet_trail
• Tag:board_type=planet_walk

Planets

Which Solar System objects are included? A typical sequence is: Sun → Mercury → Venus → Earth → Mars → Jupiter → Saturn → Uranus → Neptune

Most trails predate 2006 and include Pluto, and some even show it at more than one position. Currently, we can find 22 Plutos.

Some of the following can be included:

• asteroid belt
• Ceres
• Halley’s comet
• separate models for moons

… See full entry

Started Sep 16th.

Today I was able to participate in a Zoom meeting for the OSM Africa Mapathon where I was able to get more in depth training on mapping and I was able to finish tasks #699, #769, #784 but I still left them to be looked at by mappers more skilled than myself. Along with that we did a Kahoot with questions on OSM. I learned a lot and I hope I’m able to do something similar soon. I also hope from now on I’ll find the time to work on even more projects with my new found skills.

Yesterday I had a call with the coordinator of Unique Mappers Network after trying to reach out for 2 weeks. This is a very exciting moment for me as I’ve been wanting to volunteer for Unique Mappers Network for a while due to my interest in urban planning and development. Along with my want to volunteer to build a portfolio for my further education as I am still in senior secondary two. I hope that I can develop my mapping skills even further and help both my community and those internationally.

We maintain NoEscape 2.0 (https://nemap.fyi/), a public map built from Ukraine’s open court registry: decisions describing border-crossing attempts (mostly article 204-1) are geocoded and published as derived points - never exact coordinates, never personal data.

Overview of derived detention-case clusters, 2022-2026. Points are aggregated from court texts; no exact locations or personal data. Map data (c) OpenStreetMap contributors; basemap (c) CARTO / HOT per layer; screenshot (c) NoEscapeMap (nemap.fyi), 2026.

… See full entry

Finished another small rural town, this one Lima, Illinois.